Do you remember these items that I grew up with, most of which are now either gone or just shadows of themselves?
1. Did you look up numbers in telephone books, those thick directories that everyone had by the phone?
2. Was an 8-track tape player in your vehicle, along with those bulky tapes? They were the predecessors to cassettes.
3. How about those rotary dial phones? Your finger did the dialing. And you can slam that thing down very satisfactorily on a call gone wrong.
4. And then there were TV antennas (rabbit ears) that ultimately looked somewhat alien because there was tinfoil attached to them to try to get a clear picture. Do you remember adjusting them this way and that? And do you remember having to get up to change the channel on the television set?
5. Before there was Google, there was the World Book Encyclopedia, or Brittanica, as the case may be. That's where you went for all of your information. No typing in and clicking search. You had to at least know the alphabet and have some idea of how to find something.
6. Did you ever use a pay phone to call for a ride home? They used to be everywhere - in the stores, on the street corners. I wonder where Superman changes clothes these days?
7. Floppy disks were the storage method of choice in the early days of computers. They seemed high-tech at the time, especially when they went from the 5 1/4 inch to the 3.5-inch disks.
8. Did your first car have an ashtray and a cigarette lighter?
9. I used to roll carbon paper into a typewriter so I'd have a copy of my work. Do they even make that anymore?
10. My mother and grandmother collected S&H Green Stamps. I remember licking stamps and putting them in the books for whatever reward my mother wanted. There was a little catalog to pick things from, and she could get a toaster or a blender, stuff like that. I think they were no longer a thing by the time I married, though.
11. Did you attend the movies at the drive-in theater? I remember going to see many shows at them, most of which I was supposed to sleep through, but I watched through half-closed eyes. There are still some drive-in movie theaters, but they’re rare.
12. When it was raining outside, the gym teacher would pull out the reel-to-reel projector and show some film on health. Do you remember the flap-flap sound the film made when it broke?
13. I carried a metal lunchbox with a thermos occasionally, though I mostly bought my school lunches at the cafeteria. I seem to remember a Scooby Doo lunchbox, but maybe that was my brother's. Or possibly one that I coveted that belonged to someone else. (Which is another way of saying I don't really remember what was on my lunchbox.)
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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while, and this is my 907th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.
I now feel old. I remember ALL these things. For me, it was Star Wars/Princess Leia on my lunchboxes!!
ReplyDelete3. My grandparents had a rotary phone. It was their 2nd phone in a different room (same line). A few years ago, I was in a middle school theater class, and they had an old rotary phone to use as a prop. (It was real. Somehow it had ended up in the collection.) They were trying to figure out how to dial the thing. They were nowhere near it, so I showed them how it was done. They were flabbergasted.
ReplyDelete4. We only had the antenna on the roof. I live in the greater LA area. Our reception was pretty decent most of the time.
6. Whenever we got done with a band event, we all congregated at the payphone on campus to call for a ride home. I remember when it went from a dime to 20 cents to call (but most of us just used quarters because it was easier).
8. My current car has an ashtray and cigarette lighter. It's a '93, so...
11. We went to the drive in all the time when I was a kid. I rememeber those tinny speakers we'd have to use.
13. Every school year I'd get a new lunchbox. First they were metal, but they switched to plastic as I got older. The thermos always got misplaced as I never used it. We could get milk at school.
I love the drive-in. I had S&H Green stamps and remember all that stuff. Some thing have improved but others things have been lost and replaced with high tech confusion.
ReplyDeleteYou can still find carbon paper at some office or art supply stores. Sometimes it's called "tracing paper." Illustrators use it more often these days than typists. I would love to see S&H Green Stamps make a comeback! The shop where I work gives loyalty members a "stamp" for every $10 spent. The "stamps" appear on the bottom of the cash register receipt, but you don't have to save receipts. We track your spending and your rewards. Easier than licking those stamps, for sure, but somehow not as much fun.
ReplyDelete